Modal decay parameter estimation by nonlinear optimization techniques

Estimation of modal decay parameters from noisy measurements of reverberant
and resonating systems is a common problem in audio and acoustics, e.g.,
in room and concert hall measurements or musical instrument modeling. In
this paper, reliable methods to estimate the initial response level, decay
rate, and noise floor level from noisy measurement data are studied and compared.
A new method, based on nonlinear optimization of a model for exponential decay
plus stationary noise floor, is presented. Comparison with traditional
decay parameter estimation techniques using simulated measurement data shows
that the proposed method outperforms in accuracy and robustness, especially
in extreme SNR conditions. Three cases of practical applications of the method
are demonstrated.

This package is a (zipped) set of elementary functions plus an example
Matlab script file to start exploring with nonlinear optimization for decay
parameter estimation: